This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of ...
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This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation. The book sheds new light on the conceptualization of wealth and poverty by ordinary people in the early modern past; on the operation of credit in the early modern economy; on gendered divisions of labour and people’s working lives; and on the profound consequences of widening social inequality that redrew social relations and the calculus of esteem in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.Less

Accounting for Oneself : Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England

Alexandra Shepard

Published in print: 2015-02-19

This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation. The book sheds new light on the conceptualization of wealth and poverty by ordinary people in the early modern past; on the operation of credit in the early modern economy; on gendered divisions of labour and people’s working lives; and on the profound consequences of widening social inequality that redrew social relations and the calculus of esteem in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the ...
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In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.Less

The Age of the Efendiyya : Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Lucie Ryzova

Published in print: 2014-01-30

In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of “modern men” emerged, the efendiyya (sg. efendi). Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals and public intellectuals, the efendis represented new middle class elites. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state’s modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously “authentic” and “modern,” they assumed key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952. This book tells the story of where did these self-consciously modern men come from, and how did they come to be through multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts included social strategies pursued by “traditional” middling households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as (non-exclusive) vehicles for new forms of knowledge opening possibilities to redefine social authority; but they also included new forms of youth culture, student rituals and peer networks, as well as urban popular culture writ large. Through these contexts, a historically novel experience of being an efendi emerged. New social practices (politics, or writing) and new cultural forms and genres (literature, autobiography) were its key sites of self-expression. Through these venues, an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement was articulated, and defined against and in relation to two main contrastive others: “traditional” society and western modernity-cum-colonial authority. Both represented the efendis’ social, cultural and political nemeses, who, in some contexts, could also become his allies.

This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had ...
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This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had a bearing on their economic behaviour. Until recently researchers resisted arguments rooted in non-quantitative explanations of economic change which place the emphasis on cultural agents. The book focuses on the period circa 1750–1840 when an unprecedented amount of agricultural information was put into circulation which facilitated its consumption and incorporation into the practices of cereal and animal husbandry. In Scotland, England, and Denmark this precursor Agricultural Enlightenment triggered a modernization of the rural economy which can be labelled an Agricultural Revolution. Elsewhere the impact of the supply of agricultural knowledge was muted and it is hard to separate out the ingredients of the changes under way by the 1830s and 1840s. Adopting a continental perspective on agricultural growth, the book weighs up the effects of cultural factors by analysing the mechanisms governing knowledge production, diffusion, and adoption by farmers. Issues involving the transfer of knowledge and skill receive particular coverage. But equally the book explores the impact of demographic change, urbanization, and evidence that European agriculture was moving towards market-driven production by the end of the period. Governments were as influenced by the knowledge project of the Enlightenment as landlords and their tenants, and the book examines the proposition that institutional change ‘from above’ was the single most powerful catalyst of agricultural growth before industrialization transformed the European economy.Less

Peter M. Jones

Published in print: 2016-01-01

This book explores the knowledge underpinnings of agricultural change and growth in early modern Europe, building on the growing recognition among historians that ‘what people knew and believed’ had a bearing on their economic behaviour. Until recently researchers resisted arguments rooted in non-quantitative explanations of economic change which place the emphasis on cultural agents. The book focuses on the period circa 1750–1840 when an unprecedented amount of agricultural information was put into circulation which facilitated its consumption and incorporation into the practices of cereal and animal husbandry. In Scotland, England, and Denmark this precursor Agricultural Enlightenment triggered a modernization of the rural economy which can be labelled an Agricultural Revolution. Elsewhere the impact of the supply of agricultural knowledge was muted and it is hard to separate out the ingredients of the changes under way by the 1830s and 1840s. Adopting a continental perspective on agricultural growth, the book weighs up the effects of cultural factors by analysing the mechanisms governing knowledge production, diffusion, and adoption by farmers. Issues involving the transfer of knowledge and skill receive particular coverage. But equally the book explores the impact of demographic change, urbanization, and evidence that European agriculture was moving towards market-driven production by the end of the period. Governments were as influenced by the knowledge project of the Enlightenment as landlords and their tenants, and the book examines the proposition that institutional change ‘from above’ was the single most powerful catalyst of agricultural growth before industrialization transformed the European economy.

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape ...
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People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take today's startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in 17th-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the 15th century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich men's tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them, but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s Catherine of Aragon introduced the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the 19th century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, the author reveals how the forces that drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture — a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine — have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history.Less

Alternative Agriculture: A History : From the Black Death to the Present Day

Joan Thirsk

Published in print: 2000-03-02

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take today's startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in 17th-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the 15th century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich men's tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them, but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s Catherine of Aragon introduced the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the 19th century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, the author reveals how the forces that drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture — a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine — have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history.

Our understanding of Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s is being transformed. For decades, historians were locked in a narrow debate about the degree of central control over the terror process. Recent ...
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Our understanding of Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s is being transformed. For decades, historians were locked in a narrow debate about the degree of central control over the terror process. Recent archival research is underpinning new, innovative approaches and opening new perspectives. Historians are exploring the roots of the Terror in the heritage of war and mass repression in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods; in the regime’s focus not just on former ‘oppositionists’, wreckers, and saboteurs, but also on crime and social disorder; in the common European concern to identify and isolate ‘undesirable’ elements. They are examining in much greater depth and detail the precipitants and triggers that turned a determination to protect the Revolution into a ferocious mass repression. This volume brings together the work of the leading historians of Stalinist Terror in sixteen chapters, paired on eight themes, presenting not only the latest developments in the field, but the latest evolution of the debate. Some pairings reflect the diversity of sources, methodologies, and angles of approach to a given subject. Others show stark differences of opinion. Each is briefly introduced by the authors and because no pairing can exhaust a topic, each is followed by a short list of recommended further readings. These are biased towards books and articles in English for the undergraduates, postgraduates and other students of the Stalin-era who will be the main audience of this book.Less

The Anatomy of Terror : Political Violence under Stalin

Published in print: 2013-07-04

Our understanding of Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s is being transformed. For decades, historians were locked in a narrow debate about the degree of central control over the terror process. Recent archival research is underpinning new, innovative approaches and opening new perspectives. Historians are exploring the roots of the Terror in the heritage of war and mass repression in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods; in the regime’s focus not just on former ‘oppositionists’, wreckers, and saboteurs, but also on crime and social disorder; in the common European concern to identify and isolate ‘undesirable’ elements. They are examining in much greater depth and detail the precipitants and triggers that turned a determination to protect the Revolution into a ferocious mass repression. This volume brings together the work of the leading historians of Stalinist Terror in sixteen chapters, paired on eight themes, presenting not only the latest developments in the field, but the latest evolution of the debate. Some pairings reflect the diversity of sources, methodologies, and angles of approach to a given subject. Others show stark differences of opinion. Each is briefly introduced by the authors and because no pairing can exhaust a topic, each is followed by a short list of recommended further readings. These are biased towards books and articles in English for the undergraduates, postgraduates and other students of the Stalin-era who will be the main audience of this book.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food ...
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Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society and culture before the Norman Conquest. Part one draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, a series of landscape studies explores how these could have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country, using place-names, maps and the landscape itself. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, because it had to be, but infinitely adaptable, to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.Less

Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming

Debby BanhamRosamond Faith

Published in print: 2014-09-18

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century. This book uses a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society and culture before the Norman Conquest. Part one draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, a series of landscape studies explores how these could have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country, using place-names, maps and the landscape itself. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, because it had to be, but infinitely adaptable, to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the 18th century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political ...
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The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the 18th century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal ideal. The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves ‘all at sea’ were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected in times and places of great disconnection. Portraying the family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social stratification. It could also afford social and economic leverage to individual men and women in certain circumstances. This book explores the lives and letters of these families, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea in a series of microhistories. Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, the book argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world — much more than the American Revolution — that reshaped contemporary ideals about families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic world.Less

Atlantic Families : Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

Sarah M. S. Pearsall

Published in print: 2008-11-20

The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the 18th century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal ideal. The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves ‘all at sea’ were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected in times and places of great disconnection. Portraying the family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social stratification. It could also afford social and economic leverage to individual men and women in certain circumstances. This book explores the lives and letters of these families, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea in a series of microhistories. Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, the book argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world — much more than the American Revolution — that reshaped contemporary ideals about families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic world.

Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story ...
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Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.Less

Between the Devil and the Host : Imagining Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland

Michael Ostling

Published in print: 2011-11-01

Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Burton’s Anatomy to Hilliard’s miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed ...
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From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Burton’s Anatomy to Hilliard’s miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, bringing believers closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation—something this book calls ‘emotive improvisation’. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts—including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, mortality records, doctors’ case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays—Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across forms of evidence too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.Less

Beyond Melancholy : Sadness and Selfhood in Renaissance England

Erin Sullivan

Published in print: 2016-03-01

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Burton’s Anatomy to Hilliard’s miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, bringing believers closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation—something this book calls ‘emotive improvisation’. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts—including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, mortality records, doctors’ case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays—Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across forms of evidence too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.

The early 20th century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and ...
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The early 20th century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. It draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. It challenges many of the key conditions envisaged by demographers and historians as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. The book demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the prevention of pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, the book produces a rich understanding of the startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the changes in contraceptive behaviour in the 20th century.Less

Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960

Kate Fisher

Published in print: 2006-07-13

The early 20th century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. It draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. It challenges many of the key conditions envisaged by demographers and historians as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. The book demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the prevention of pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, the book produces a rich understanding of the startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the changes in contraceptive behaviour in the 20th century.

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